Tomorrow by Graham Swift

stay with his Uncle Eddie, whole summers long, when he was a boy and Grandpa Pete was working hard to get his business off the ground. He’d be dropped off in July and picked up again at the end of August. This is why your dad could call himself a “Sussex boy,” even though he was brought up in commuter-belt Kent.
    Those summers in Sussex proved a boon for your dad, but they didn’t help relations with
his
dad or between his dad and Uncle Eddie. Grandpa Pete got it very wrong if he thought he was neatly solving the problem of summer holidays while exploiting his older brother at the same time. It was always pretty obvious to me that there’d been plenty of love lost between your dad, when he was a boy, and his Uncle Eddie. That Uncle Eddie had been like a second father, a sort of summer father, to him.
    It was also pretty obvious, to go back further, that during that time when Grandpa Pete was a prisoner of war and your dad was born—during that time, Kate, he got talking to you about last Christmas—it must have been Uncle Eddie who first saw your dad, first picked him up and held him. I can picture him putting aside his pipe carefully first. Picturing your dad here as a baby dangling from his uncle’s arms is a little trickier, but it’s a nice trickiness.
    Uncle Eddie had a heart condition—which didn’t seem to stop him puffing away at that pipe. He’d never had to serve in the war, and that was another source of resentment for his younger brother. Eddie had just sat out the war in that far from pokey cottage of his, while Grandpa Pete had gone off to fight. Oddly enough, according to your father, that was the very phrase that Grandpa Pete liked to use about the war: that he’d “sat it out.” Your dad never really knew if he was referring to being a prisoner of war or just to being in the air force. Airmen, after all, go to war sitting down. And Grandpa Pete, as a navigator, used to have his own little desk, with a desk lamp, up in the sky, though I don’t think it made him any safer.
    But perhaps it was just his formula for having been a prisoner, or for stopping his son asking any more questions. I remember you, Nick, once asking Grandpa Pete about the war and saying, “But didn’t you try to escape?” He just looked at you apologetically, as if he was sorry he wasn’t Steve McQueen.
    Uncle Eddie died because of his heart condition years before you were born, and I went with your dad, who was pretty upset, to the funeral. Then Grandpa Pete got the cottage and eventually moved there with Grannie Helen. Now, of course, he’s in Birle churchyard too, just a few steps from Eddie.
    Mike and I have never really talked about it (I’m not
that
much of a Hook, perhaps), but it always seemed to me that in his last years at Birle, at Coombe Cottage, Grandpa Pete got more and more like his brother—or like his brother as I’d remembered him, or like his brother might have been if he’d lived beyond sixty. Grandpa Pete must have always thought that Eddie was the main item, destined to be, but for a little glitch of family planning, an only child like me and your dad. Could that even be why your dad was so fond of him? Eddie was nine when Grandpa Pete was just a baby, the same age your dad was when he spent his first summer at Birle. These things count maybe.
    Anyway, it seemed to me that your Grandpa Pete in his later years got more like Uncle Eddie. Grandpa Pete never smoked a pipe or rode a bicycle and Uncle Eddie never had a dog, but the differences got less and the similarities got more. Grandpa Pete even died of a heart attack too, if not at fifty-seven. It could be just a coincidence or it could be one of those things that runs in the family. Ever since your Grandpa Pete died, I’ve wanted your dad to go and have his heart checked.
    I think his heart might come under a bit of strain tomorrow.
    But at Uncle Eddie’s funeral, years before you were born, there was another “uncle,” called Tim. Tim